You know you’ve lived a full life when it takes four birthday parties to celebrate it.

Jackie Angelino, a perpetual peace activist, turns 100 today.

She’ll mark the occasion with party No. 3 at First Unitarian Universalist Church, where the
longtime member is known for greeting newcomers with “Hi, I’m Jackie. What would you like to do for
social justice to help us?”

Party No. 4 — also at the church, 93 W. Weisheimer Rd. — will follow on Thursday. Angelino has alot of admirers.

I caught up with her at a North Side restaurant last week, when she was fresh off the two other
parties. She was wearing a T-shirt imprinted with the peace symbol and lyrics from the John Lennon
song
Imagine: “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.”

Jacques, her son and caretaker, spoke loudly into her ear and filled in details when her memory
lapsed. There’s a lot to remember.

She was born in India, where her French father and Swiss mother worked for the British civil
service. After her father died in an epidemic, she and her mother lived in France and England
before settling in Stanton, Neb.

She was a student at the University of Nebraska in 1938 when she met Henry Angelino, a young
anthropologist with a similar bent toward social justice. They were married in 1939 and moved to
Columbus 30 years later, so Mr. Angelino, who died in 2000, could teach at Ohio State
University.

Mrs. Angelino’s friends and relatives have a litany of stories about her.

While living in New Mexico during the 1940s, she discovered that grocers were charging American
Indians higher prices than other customers. So she bought a big supply of groceries, drove them to
a pueblo and sold them at her cost to the people there. She also started a free women’s clinic in
New Mexico.

After moving to Oklahoma, she and Mr. Angelino participated in a civil-rights march with Coretta
Scott King in Oklahoma City. Mrs. Angelino also founded the first racially integrated preschool in
Oklahoma.

During a boycott to protest the treatment of farm workers in the late ’60s, Mrs. Angelino
stationed herself in the produce aisle of a Columbus supermarket and told people not to buy
grapes.

“They never threw her out,” Jacques said.

She also marched against the Ku Klux Klan, worked for gay rights, pushed recycling, fed the
homeless and protested the Vietnam War. Well into her 90s, she was a familiar sight on Saturdays at
North Broadway and N. High Street, protesting the Iraq war.

She still volunteers at an Athens, Ohio, food pantry.

When I asked her the one change she’d like to see in the world, she said:

“Accepting other people and other things and other foods and other clothes and different styles
and things like that. That’s what I think is very important: acceptance.”